


tied like two in tethers

by votives



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Drug Addiction, M/M, Purple Prose, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 16:50:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18167711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/votives/pseuds/votives
Summary: Klaus' head is a haunted house. He covets a favourite ghost.





	tied like two in tethers

In the general run of things, you don't take the long route downtown and end up somewhere along the border of Laos. But chimpanzees aren't doctors, androids don't mother, briefcases don't shoot you through time and space and babies take nine months to cook.

Men shouldn't have shrapnel where their torsos should be, either.

This was no baptism of fire. It was a baptism of ice. Klaus doesn't stop shivering through visions of mortality that are sicker than liquor. (The skeleton of a kitten that Allison had bought home to die in a cardboard box in the kitchen. A bird in the courtyard, still warm, just feathers. The statue of his dead brother bearing a number but no epitaph). Klaus thinks of his siblings as he digs a shallow pit into his beans and motherfuckers. He'd love that in any other life. He is unbloused so Dave tucks his trousers into his boot tops, smacks him on the back and when he hands him a cigarette, Klaus' eyes catch his. The rush of smoke to his lungs, the brown to blue is all the hit he needs. Klaus never forgets the size of Dave's hands.

Klaus' squadmates hang loose. They're awfully gung-ho as they split C-rats and nightmares dressed up as jokes. Klaus has heard his fair share of ghost stories and unlike memories, they don't sweeten with time. They're from other worlds entirely. Him: a half-century. Them: a milieu of them versus us, of reds and whites and blues.

Still, he laughs a laugh that's watery and filled with cracks because he is imprisoned in his incognito. He isn't like the cherry, medically discharged for cowering in his jungle boots. He won't cry for his mama. But he'll cry as he clasps at his clutch belt for dear life, sickened by the D-rings about his gear. (They will come to hold his dippy finery together four and a half decades later and when he realises, he'll rip the lashing point from its seams).

There's an abstract cruelty about it; this time, this place (a place he can't pronounce but he sure as hell doesn't want to die in). You'd think a stringbean like him would have no business fighting a man's game. But he belongs here in a roundabout way. Drugs and war go hand in hand, after all. He's in the heart of the golden triangle, the motherland of illicit opiates, an empyrean kingdom for a cog in the death machine.

The pres had said it himself. There's no drug problem in 'Nam. Problems can be solved. But Klaus grew up a problem and he was never solved, just left to fester like a wound that won't close no matter how many drugs he tosses into its gaping dicktrap. If there is fuel to be had, he'll keep the fire burning.

It takes a pharmacy. There's the piecemeal zeal (amphetamines that boost performance on long missions), the sedatives that keep the breakdown at bay and help him sleep (and oh, how he sleeps), Monday pills, the esprit de corps that is a drug in of itself and the pièce de résistance: the dew. And when the corps starts burning the good shit, there's good ol' China white. It's as good a purifying salt as any and Klaus spends it like holy water, douses himself with it.

Klaus spends the first half of his service goldbricking and making friends with the stiffs in the glad bags, crafting hallucinogenic icebreakers that give them something to talk about across the veil. The second? Irretrievably lovesick. Klaus had always thought that when love finally found him it would be a Shakespearean affair with a lot of fanfare and yearning (or a lot of spit in a dingy night club bathroom). There's none of that. It burgeons in friendship, across a major battle ground, in his chest.

As a rule of thumb, Dave's C's contain three sticks of gum. When there's two, he'll give the first to the hooch girl that cleans the tents and split the second with Klaus. He lets him bleed the artificial lemon from the cud, has at it when it's dull and flavourless like gray matter. When his jaw gets tired, he sticks it behind his ear for good luck.

One day, they're sitting atop the amtrak so Chas' rockets don't cook them alive. Klaus tells Dave he covets a pink ao dai of his own. He drags the word out like a war. Dave says his chicken legs would look real good in a pair of silk trousers. Klaus tells him he should see his leathers. There's no chagrin. All-American hero Dave (honest, healthy, member of the het club Dave) does not flinch. There's an inkling. And that's all it is.

If he were not displaced in time, this would be his ace in the hole. Arthritic, alcoholic and devastatingly handsome Klaus' tactical gambit in the game of drafts. He'd tell the civilian shrink that he was a homy palone (had there been any room for doubt between his kohled eyelids, his feminine gait and his mother's best skirt) as he professed loudly (and proudly) that he not only fucked men but he _liked_ it. Were it contestable, he'd have sprung across the desk and smacked the quack on the lips. He'd have blown him a kiss on the way out, too (to really seal the deal). He'd sooner die than see a one-way ticket to Saigon.

If his upbringing inculcated him with anything, it's that he's certainly not ordinary. Men (normal, well-adjusted men) are proud and have great, carbuncle libidos to swagger around. That's why he trades cigarettes for nude cuties. And how he comes to loathe the colour pink dint of Miss December '64 and her pink bed sheets and her pink nipples and her pink twenty-four inch waist.

When there's a lull, the two of them will chain smoke until dark, bandying stories like trading cards. Dave tells of his ordinary family back home in Maine, some eight thousand miles away. Klaus tells of his not so ordinary family, some semicentury away. Dave thinks Klaus is as nutty as a fruitcake. But the one his ma makes is the best in all Augusta, one that heaves with brandy and citrus peels. She writes him every week. Klaus needs a map to find himself in Dave's long eyelashes and right when he feels brave enough to ask if he has a Suzie Rottencrotch back home with baby blues as big as his, the mosquitoes force them back to their nets.

Some light detective work saves Klaus face. Dave's finger is ringless and he spends a whole lot of time watching Klaus move his hips and checking out the way his greens hug his bony ass. He files a request to take his R and R in Bangkok, not Hawaii, for the bottle, not the boom-boom girls. Klaus wonders if he's celibate, whether he has impulses listed on his 201 file, if he fancies himself a Papa San, if he's just like him: a no-beer queer.

Klaus hasn't put in his twelve months when they're told to turn in their weapons and get some shut-eye. Come morning, Dave is smacking him in the showers with his Jesus boots and they're headed to Danang to catch the next commercial freedom bird to Bangkok. In a tin can full of bridled testosterone, the flower seekers look forward to the rental company. Meanwhile, Klaus envies the stewardesses' three inch heels and fosters an ache of his own.

His hypothesis will be proven correct by stolen kisses in a go-go bar in Bang Rak, after swilling drinks in a dance hall with two hundred very pretty Thai girls. The economy of the body fails to capture Dave's attention. It stirs Klaus', though (the miniskirts and the knee-highs, at least). Two thirty-threes allow him a bravery in exchange for a certain clumsiness. Dave's eyes are on him like he wants to jump his bones. Ever the cheap Charlie, it's in thinking of ways to thank him for the drinks that Klaus realises that he loves the man before him to his marrows.

He kisses Dave as fiercely as a bear. There's the familiar thrill of the rush and the satisfaction of the conquest melting into a different buzz entirely. If he'd have known, he wouldn't have taken that first hit, wouldn't have contributed to the long list of addictions he can't curb, can't stay away from. He can freefall into the open arms of drugs and alcohol because it dispenses on tap. But come over a month, this is an itch he'll never be able to scratch.

Not even in the attic back home, trussed like a Christmas tree and screaming like a child in the throes of the come-down sweats. He'll come so close. It's the universe's twisted form of tease and denial. That's how Klaus justifies stealing to fund a habit that prevents him from remembering what was stolen from him. The big guy is like a relationship. He's about wheeling and dealing. There should be a fair tradeoff but lately he's more give than take.

Drugs don't make for much recall, save love letters scribbled in the dog-ears of bibles, on playing cards passed like whispers under sandbags between artillery barrages. Klaus will remember the paper being so thin that his pulse upset the pages.

Klaus was always too fucked up to believe in much of anything but he believes in the two of them. He's bold as brass, having never heard Dave's name on the tail end of a zulu. Even when all the technology in the world guarantees armies of ghosts but cannot ensure a victory, even when there's no end in sight, even when the enemy has stripped them thin.

Dave holds his short-timer's stick up like an Advent candle. He notches it for each of his days left in country. The day he dies, the day before his rotation day, he is left with a stub the size of his ring finger. It's smaller than the hole the sapper blows in his chest, smaller than the breath Klaus takes before he screams hopelessly for a medic (then a bac-si, bac-si, bac-si in bastardised Vietmanese when the adrenaline gives him a bastardised presence of mind).

Klaus is convinced they'll bustle him off into a mortar magnet, patch him up and feed him Wonder Bread. They'll eat fruitcake and Dave will show him around the town he grew up in. Only, Klaus never stops screaming even when blood stops gurgling out of blue lips, when the death chills come a-claiming, even when he hops, even when he's pounding his fists against the unfeeling asphalt and hard-nosed pedestrians look at him like the freewheeling pill popper he is and always will be.

The world is changed and stark and cold with a vastness too large to even comprehend. Klaus is not sure when or where he drifted to but he knows it's colder here than it had been on the front lines, that there is an ache beneath the chill and a fresh presence (one that's as boundless as time and matters of life and death, steadfast and reckless and insatiable, that fights and loves like it is running out of time, at a speed Klaus could never hope to reach).

He'll remember them as a fire, warping in the dark and an ache behind his eyes in the ashes, in the cruelty of knowing they could never complete what they started. They slept side-by-side in their racks. Klaus had found romance in the two of them being buried like that, in being closed like a book, in death being wrapped up with a big, tidy bow, six feet and nails.

Death is life's only guarantee, but even then, it isn't. Neither is closure. And like shell fragments in a chest, death doesn't make for a pretty end at all.

  



End file.
